35. Hans Litten

I have studied Nazi Germany Someone stood and preached to me All the ‘important’ names All the ‘important’ dates I wrote them down like longshore secrets And debated over them Like they were the pencil sharpenings With which I littered the floor ‘Excellent analysis’ she said I have even stood by the gas chambers And the gallows At Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp And written insensitive poetry about insensitivity But have I heard of Hans Litten? Of course I haven’t. I have stood in the Berlin gestapo office And formed philosophies that feel more like profanities Wondering how it can ever be appropriate To take a school trip to a genocide But tonight my ‘important’ education Feels like the greatest atrocity My guilty ignorance beats almost unbearably Around my rib-cage And waits for the shatter and the shards Because I have never heard of Hans Litten We all know six million But who knows the six million? We remember names that we stored away Because mentioning them in an essay Might bring about a higher grade Displaying ‘a highly developed and complex level of understanding’ We remember names like we remember shopping lists Or science lessons; A few particular points No attachment necessary In fact, detachment is far more becoming When it comes to exam period They never told us about Hans Litten Or about the men who also ran in the race to be in history books Or about their mothers And their fathers And the people they shared cells with And the people they shared graves with My God, they never told us about Hans Litten And Hans Litten is better known than most of those phantom dead Those cracked-open voices that dared to raise Until they were too loud for anything but the conveyer-belt Concentration Camp system. And the thing is that six million is not such a big number anymore Because there are 49,506,514 views of Simon Cowell crying And nearly 300 million of One Direction singing a song which is not so beautiful after all And people are so desensitized to the number six million That they believe that the world Would not have enough shit in it Without them posting hatred after obscenity after hatred in the YouTube comments And Hans Litten, I can’t help feeling that I’ve failed you My generation could tell you the private lives of their idols But would not know your name And we will still pour into school on Monday morning And chorus our tireless fatigue and our lack of motivation for life And I will still pour into school on Monday morning And let myself complain and moan and grapple for sympathy. I’ve acquired this abstracted self-loathing recently That is less a hatred of myself than a hatred of what I have made of myself Of my ingratitude and self-centred inability To compose poems that do not start and end with Me And of my procrastination and my ceaseless desire To live something other than the life I’ve been given Like I asked for extra cheese and got given Margharita Fuck. I’m insufferable. Hans Litten your list of injuries was ten times longer than the list of all the wrongs I’ve had done against me.

Last night I went to watch a play called Taken At Midnight... it's about Hans Litten, in case you hadn't guessed... it tore me to shreds and then made whatever was left of me want to be ripped up too.